


Why Her Not Me

by StuckInAFantasy6



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Family, Macy has feelings, Mel and Macy love each other, Sisterhood, Songfic, and she should probably learn how to talk about them, but i love her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 10:09:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19082878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StuckInAFantasy6/pseuds/StuckInAFantasy6
Summary: “Why should I be the one who had to go without?”Based on the song 'Why Her Not Me' by Grace Carter.Spoilers for the finale. Mostly a Macy centric/family fic.





	Why Her Not Me

**Author's Note:**

> A little Macy angst for all of you! I love her to pieces and wanted to explore her character a little bit more. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> I thought the lyrics fit so well for certain moments of Macy's arc in the show, and I definitely reccomend checking out the song, and the music video :)

_I feel your ghost, smell you all over my clothes_  
_Oh, all your smoke's stuck in me longer then you did_  
_I had my doubts, I had to check it all out_  
_And now I see that you've run back when I thought you'd quit_

Macy was exhausted. Emotionally. Physically. In every sense of the word. Logically, she knew she should be happy, and she was – everything was the way it was supposed to be, the way it was before Macy thought she could fix everything, the way it was before she took away people’s free will to feed her own selfish notions of the life she deserved. When she started this, all she wanted to do was make things better for everyone, but it wasn’t long before she started spiralling. Power like the kind she harnessed was far too strong for one person to handle. She should have known that. And she did know that, but she didn’t care at the time. 

Having been lonely for so long, she was so caught up in her own self-interest that she had almost forgotten how to be with people. How to be with a family. And she had hurt them, she had hurt her own sisters, and Harry; her sisters who had only wanted to help her and show her she was wanted, and Harry who hadn’t been afraid of her and told her that he loved her.  
She had pushed them all away and left them before they could leave her. She hadn’t counted on them wanting to stay, wanting to be with her, no matter what. She hadn’t counted on them loving her. 

_You took my air out of your lungs_  
_So you could breathe with another one_

Macy was used to being alone. She had tried to tell herself that it was better that way because it seemed like no matter what she did, she always ended up in the same place. She had learnt that letting someone in meant risking that yet another person was going to leave her. 

So, when she met her sisters she was happier than she ever thought she would be. She fell in love with the idea of their sisterhood, the idea of something permanent and the more they got to know each other and the closer they became, she knew she loved them. But she couldn’t help but be reminded of her mother’s abandonment every time she walked past an innocent photo frame left on a corner table or a windowsill showing off a smiling Marisol and her two younger daughters and envied the way the name ‘mom’ fell so easily from their lips when they talked about her. 

_Oh tell me, why her, not me?_  
_What did I do for you to wreck it all?_  
_Oh Lord, it's not my fault_

She had hated herself for it. The way she would catch herself wondering what was so special about her sisters that their mother had chosen to keep them and not her. Or rather, not what was so special about them, but what was so wrong about her. 

She hated herself because she loved them. They were special to her, and she was proud to call them her sisters. But, before she knew about the circumstance of her birth she couldn’t help but wonder what it was about her that was so bad that her mother couldn’t keep her. 

 

_Why her, not me?_  
_Why did you have to build the walls so high?_  
_Oh no, I'm not done climbing_  


_She heard about me, and all your history_  
_I'm not tryna burn myself but I can’t let it go_

Macy remembered that one (terribly conveniently – as if she believed in coincidences these days) stormy night that had changed everything. She had knocked on the door, her knuckles white and her nails digging painfully into her palm and a photograph of a ghost pinched between her thumb and forefinger of her other hand. She didn’t know why she hadn’t called ahead or even emailed, and when Galvin asked her later she still didn’t have an answer. 

She felt sick as the door swung open to reveal a pretty, young brunette staring at her with an expectant expression. She took a second to breathe, unsure of what was going to come out of her mouth next.

**“Hi, um, I’m Macy Vaughn”**

It was then that she spotted a slightly older woman stood a little further away with her arms across her chest and a guarded expression. She had barely been able to break the news before there was a suspiciously timed strike of lightning.  
Mel had been instantly suspicious of her back then, not that Macy could blame her. The way she had directed that now familiar angry stare at her and asked her what she wanted, told her that they didn’t have any money, and demanded to know why she was there, it had hurt. 

Ultimately, Macy was happy she had found her sisters, but she couldn’t help wondering if Mel had been right in the first place - maybe she wasn’t supposed to be there. 

_Piece by piece uncovering dishonesty_  
_Never been truth in anything I've ever known_

Dexter Vaughn had never told Macy a lot about her mother, despite being deeply in love with Marisol for far longer than his daughter had known. 

The three things Macy was certain were true growing up were: her mother died when she was two years old, her mother loved her very much (or so she was told) and everything happens for a reason.

When her mother first left her, Macy was too young to fully grasp the loss. She couldn’t comprehend that the warm arms in which she was once held would never touch her again, that there would be no more soft tones of a voice she would soon forget whispering expressions of love she could not yet understand, that the loving eyes that watched out for her would no longer be allowed to be set upon her. 

But as Macy grew so did her curiosity. She was never the most emotionally aware – she could be too blunt, too rational, too clueless – and the later isolation from her peers didn’t help matters, but by the time she was five years old she had figured out that asking her daddy where her mother was had only made him sad. He would placate her by reminding her of those three truths. So, after a while she stopped asking.

Her mother was only spoken of wistfully on her birthdays and Christmases. She had blown out her birthday cake candles and set the star atop the Christmas tree upon her father’s shoulders and mumbled wishes he was never supposed to hear. And later, he would tuck her into bed and kiss her head as if he could make her feel the love of both mother and father. 

The rest of the time she kept it all inside. She would gaze enviously at the mothers who would scoop their children up into their arms when they ran through the school gates. Her heart would pound stubbornly, and her throat would feel tight as she watched mums smooth back their children’s soft fly-away hairs and kiss their cheeks. Little Macy would fidget from one foot to the other and chew on her sleeve whilst she waited to run into her daddy’s arms and tell him all about what she had learned in class that day. She felt guilty growing up longing for a mother when she had such a great father.

But the longing grew stronger with age. When she was dropped off at boarding school for the first time and had to say goodbye to her father, she wished she had an extra pair of arms to hug her. She spent the rest of her nights at school with her covers pulled over her head trying to block out the taunts of her classmates she suffered during the long days and each year begged her father not to send her back to that place. She wondered what her mother might say to her if she was there.

After her father died, for the first time Macy was truly alone. She had always felt like an outcast, a pariah for reasons unbeknownst to her, but when she had thought she had been orphaned, she fully resigned herself to a life of loneliness. That was one of the only times in her life she allowed herself to cry. Maybe she just wasn’t meant to have a family. 

Macy had built a life around those pillar beliefs. Her mother died when she was two years old, her mother loved her very much and everything happens for a reason.  
Naturally, when the first of these beliefs was proved to be a lie, it was only a matter of time before she started questioning everything she’d ever known.

And once the floodgates opened she couldn’t help but feel haunted by her father’s words:  
**‘Every time I look at Macy, I’m reminded that one day she’ll learn the truth’.**

_Finding out I'm not the only one_  
_Took the air right out my lungs_

When Macy had first seen the house, she couldn’t believe it. She thought maybe she was just seeing what she wanted to see, but she couldn’t shake this feeling that there was something about that house, something she had only seen in a photograph.

As soon as she arrived at the lab that day she desperately searched for any information on that house and who lived there, according to what Galvin had told her. Apparently, a university professor had lived there until she recently died. Macy was curious, she was almost certain it was the same house, and she wanted to know who lived there after her mother had died. Had the house been bought? Had someone inherited it? Did she have some distant cousin her father hadn’t mentioned? 

She was not expecting to see the smiling face from the worn photograph staring back at her from an online news article.

She definitely was not expecting to read about the two daughters she had left when she died.

When she died less than a week ago. 

_Oh tell me, why her, not me?_  
_What did I do for you to wreck it all?_  
_Oh Lord, it's not my fault_

She couldn’t help but ask about her, but she had almost regretted it when she found herself sat on their mother’s bed between her ‘new’ sisters watching a home video of a happy family she had never been part of.  
Hearing her mother’s voice for the first time made her eyes water and knowing she would never hear it in person and she would never know how her name sounded from her own mother’s lips settled a feeling of sickness in her stomach. 

She watched on with a mixture of envy and intrigue curling in the pit of her stomach. On the screen her mother gave Maggie a big kiss on her head and turned to Mel behind the camera.  
“I’m proud of you both” she had said. 

Macy knew her mother never intended for her to see this and knew that her existence was just as much a secret to her sisters as theirs was to her, but it had still hurt to hear how proud she was of two of her daughters. She wondered whether she would have been proud of her too.

She seemed great, but she had also left her.

And then Maggie had said what Macy had been trying to push to the back of her mind. She had been lonely growing up, and now that she had found this she was terrified of losing it.

 

_Why her, not me?_  
_Why did you have to build the walls so high?_  
_Oh no, I'm not done climbing_

The whole ‘sisterhood’ thing was difficult to navigate at first. ‘Majority rules’ might have seemed democratic in theory, but in practice it only served to create a rift between them. 

They had stumbled at the first hurdle. As sisters, they had agreed to wait and use the truth serum on Harry, and that they wouldn’t go near the Ouija board until then. Macy hadn’t wanted to be the rational one for once in her life. If she was being honest with herself, all she wanted to do was be selfish and demand answers from the board, to ask her mother why she left her and to hear that it was a mistake. She wanted to be wanted. But she knew she had to be the voice of reason. 

Her sisters hadn’t waited in the end though, and Macy understood, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t made her feel like an outsider once more. 

So, they dropped it. 

And when it came to the decision of whether they would accept their witchly fates, it had to be unanimous. For Macy it was never a question; she had fed them a short quip about winning a Nobel prize (not that she wouldn’t be honoured) but she just wanted to know her sisters.

_Tell me, why her?_  
_You gave her unconditional love_  
_Tell me, why her?_

It had been good for a while. Macy tried to push aside her feelings of envy and perpetual loneliness and focus on what she had in the moment. She had a good job, her first semi-serious boyfriend and a family. She had found a kind of hope she had never known. 

The first time Maggie brought her coffee from that cute kiosk near the university without having to ask her order, she felt a warmth spread through her chest; the first time Mel had hugged her, even with their rocky beginning, Macy hadn’t wanted her to let go; the first time Harry had sat on the edge of her bed and gently stroked the back of her hand, she had felt loved. 

_But I'm still climbing_  
_Tell me, why her?_  
_You gave me conditional love_  
_Tell me, why her?_

Then she learnt about her demon side, and she felt so alien. The ‘darkness’ in her now had a name. She had felt wrong for so long, but she never knew why. She had demon blood in her and her parents had hidden her resurrection as a baby from her. 

Macy could have felt relieved by the knowledge that her mother had no choice but to leave her and it was an act of love and, to some degree, she did, but she was also felt cheated. She might have technically cheated death, but she was cheated out of the life she should have had in return.

Charity had once revealed to her that her mother had asked for a spell to be put on her, to extract all the pain and anguish over a ‘tragic loss’, and now Macy wondered whether the maternal love that had been stolen from her too soon was carried through that at all. 

_I won't stop fighting_  
_No, no, no_  
_I won't lay low, low, low_  
_You gave my soul, soul, soul_  
_I'm not giving in, no_  
_No, no, no_  
_I won't lay low, low, low_  
_I've done no wrong, wrong, wrong_  
_I'm not giving in, no_

She took on The Source because it had seemed like the right thing to do. She hadn’t wanted anyone else to get hurt and she thought she could handle it.

Then, she overheard her sisters and Harry talking about her. The discomfort that they were talking about her, and not to her, flitted between the pit of her stomach and the hollow of her chest, but she needed to hear what they would say next. Her heart ached when she heard Maggie’s wish for her mother, which mirrored the many Macy had made over the years, and she knew then what she needed to do. The revelation that they were afraid of her only solidified it in her mind. 

By the time Harry had sat on the edge of her bed and touched her arm and told her that they weren’t scared of her and they all loved her, it was too late.

 _Why her, not me?_  
_What did I do for you to wreck it all?_  
_Oh Lord, it's not my fault_

Macy’s first attempt to fix everything went to hell and now she was frustrated. 

Mel had to be the sacrifice. She had really believed that and was so blinded by rage and pain that she hadn’t realised how wrong she was.  
Hearing Mel tell her that she wasn’t their sister had brought too many scary feelings back for Macy. It didn’t matter that in this reality they had no reason to believe that she was their mother’s daughter, and it didn’t matter that Macy knew she shouldn’t manipulate their lives in this way, the only thing that mattered is that Mel had just said the very thing that Macy was most afraid of and there was no way she could take it back. 

From the start Macy had felt that Mel had been the one who had kept her at arm’s length. It was never either of their intentions when they disagreed, but it still happened all too often for Macy’s taste. She had just wanted to be accepted by her sisters, and although she and Mel loved each other, the power coursing through Macy blinded her to the good between them. 

She dismissed the memories of the comforting strength in Mel’s arms around her and the relief on her face after a particularly close call and tried not to remember the way it sounded like safety and forgiveness when her sister told her she loved her. She focussed instead on the distrust she had seen flicker in Mel’s eyes when she had first moved in and the infuriating way she always thought she knew what was best for her. 

She needed to tell herself that Mel had never really loved her, and she would have left her in the end, just like everyone else. She needed to fool herself that much to be able to sacrifice the sister that she loved.

 _Why her, not me?_  
_Why did you have to build the walls so high?_  
_Oh no, I'm not done climbing_

She was forced to watch her mother die in front of her for the second time and she wanted to scream until her throat was raw. She wanted to break down right there and then in front of Harry and Maggie and make them see the anguish that pushed her to this place. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. 

She tried to help them all be together, she told Maggie.

She spent so many years believing her mother was dead, and finally, she thought it was her turn to be with her. But every time she thought she might just get that chance, she lost her all over again. 

When she was a baby she hadn’t understood her mother’s ‘death’. 

When she moved to Hilltown she hadn’t felt she had the right to mourn her mother’s actual death the way a daughter should.

But feeling her mother die in her arms, feeling the life drain from her body and the crushing weight of it all, and seeing her mother fall out of that same window as she had seen with her Evil Sight, it was too much. She felt the pain in every cell of her body; a deep ache in her fingertips spread through the veins in her wrists and straight to her heart suffocating it, and she choked on a sob. 

She wasn’t prepared for this. 

_Tell me, why her?_  
_You gave her unconditional love_  
_Tell me, why her?_

**“Why should I be the one who had to go without?”**

She knew she sounded like a petulant child, but she didn’t care anymore. 

How was it fair that Maggie and Mel grew up being cuddled and kissed by a mom when they were sad or sick? How was it fair that every Mother’s Day they crawled into a warm bed with a breakfast tray instead of talking to the walls? Why did it have to be her that was left in the cold?

There was a familiar sharp prick of guilt in her heart when her thoughts turned to her father. Macy knew her father had worked tirelessly to give her everything a child could possibly want. He had given her a roof over her head, a good education, and there had always been food on the table. On top of it all, he had loved her, and she was so thankful for that. 

But he couldn’t be her mother. 

She had missed out on so much for so long and she had wanted it all back. 

_But I'm still climbing_

Macy had always prided herself on her ability to separate herself from her emotions and make decisions based on reason. She often fell into the trap of rationalisation; her instinct to apply logic to any obstacle made it easy for her to live comfortably in her little bubble of compartmentalisation and scientific deduction, but often left her out of touch with other people. 

She had told Mel that she had always been the problem, that she refused to let her in, so she had to go. But, shaken up from watching their mother die once more when she had done everything in her power to prevent it, she realised she was wrong. All the heartache had clouded her judgement. She had thought she was creating solutions, but in trying to make things better she had only made them worse, and she had taken it out on her sister.

So, she considered all the factors in front of her. The only the common denominator in all the grief was her. She was the problem that needed to be fixed. She was the one that had to go.  
Everything would be so much easier for everyone when she was gone.

_Tell me, why her?_  
_You gave me conditional love_  
_Tell me, why her?_

God, she remembered being so angry at them. 

**“You’re trying to take away my power!”**

Because the truth was she was clinging to it for dear life. That power had made her feel like she was worth something. It had given her hope that maybe, just maybe, she could fix everything. If she could just save Galvin, if she could save her mother…maybe she’d stop feeling like this. 

**“Oh, you will. Everybody does eventually. Oh, you’re scared of me. I’m scared of me! Why wouldn’t you leave?”**

She didn’t think she could handle that. It was too much. It was all…too much.

**“I don’t believe you. So just back off!”**

She needed to get them out of there. She needed to get them away from her. But most of all, she needed to push down that tiny part of her that hoped they would come back for her.

_I won't stop fighting_

They did. She had made them jump through hoops to prove it, but watching her sisters refuse to leave her behind sparked something inside Macy. She had been breaking slowly for too long, she could feel the cracks in every part of her – her armour against the world had been left dented and scratched every time she found herself on the outside and her heart was splintered into spiderweb cracks from her own insecurities. 

She had begged them to leave. 

Harry had urged Mel to take his hand, so he could orb them out. Macy knew that despite his feelings for her, he had to put the safety of the Charmed Ones above anything.  


But her sisters had refused. They had stayed even as she tried her hardest to push them out, to keep them safe and away from her. They had stayed, and they promised her they weren’t going anywhere, no matter what.

Macy finally let herself believe them.

**Author's Note:**

> Fixed a slight inaccuracy :)


End file.
